LIKE A HORSE AND CARRIAGE: So when I first read the Michael Kinsley “Abolish Marriage” piece, I thought about blogging something on it.

Then I thought, What are you gonna say? “No, you’re being stupid. Stop being stupid”?

(My personal favorite bit from the piece: “Yes, yes, marriage is about more than sleeping arrangements. There are children, there are finances, there are spousal job benefits like health insurance and pensions. In all these areas, marriage is used as a substitute for other factors that are harder to measure, such as financial dependence or devotion to offspring. It would be possible to write rules that measure the real factors at stake and leave marriage out of the matter.” My emphases. Not that Kinsley’s actually gonna, you know, give us some idea what those rules might look like, or why people will choose these constraints once they’ve been unhooked from the still-romantic, still-enticing concept of “marriage.”)

Then I thought more about it, and connected Kinsley’s piece with the long thing I wrote about chastity counseling and marriageless neighborhoods, below.

And now I’m mad. Because, see, I spend a lot of time dealing with the fallout from a cultural belief that the marriage license is just a piece of paper. That the important thing is the Relationship, not the Structure–as if those two concepts could somehow be separated, as if some structures do not support love and others weaken it. That everybody should make up his or her own family model. That sex and marriage and childrearing and romantic love are four totally distinct, hermetically sealed concepts. (That’s something that really kills me: You’ll have sex, knowing full well that you could be making a baby [you know this because it’s happened to a lot of your friends…], with a guy you wouldn’t marry because you don’t want to form a permanent bond with him. Um?) The results of this worldview: chaotic lives, fatherless children, shattered relationships, post-abortion grief, poverty, and fatalism. Welcome to the pursuit of happiness ca. 2003.

Right after the bit I quoted above, Kinsley says, “Regarding children and finances, people can set their own rules, as many already do.” No $#@!, Sherlock. That’s part of the problem.

How could anyone look at marriage in America today and think it needs to become more ad hoc, more centered on the individual contracting adults and not on the children and the wider society, more do-it-yourself?

Marriage has developed over time (ooh, Hayek would like this!) to fulfill several specific needs that hold society together: couples’ need for a promise of fidelity; children’s need for a father and for stability and security; young people’s need for a tie to the next and the previous generations; young people’s need for a transition to adult womanhood and manhood; men’s (women’s too, but especially men’s) need for a channel for sexual desire that is fruitful, not destructive.

As we strip marriage of its societal honor, its special status, and the various features that helped it fulfill its complex functions (and I really think its restriction to opposite-sex couples is one of these features), we make it much, much harder for love to make the world go ’round. We make it much harder to link eros and responsibility. We make it much harder for adults’ desires and children’s interests to line up–thus forcing unnecessary tragic choices between adults and their own children. We also, I note for the libertarians in my readership, weaken the societal infrastructure that makes limited government possible.

For the record, that’s why I oppose same-sex marriage, too. I’ll be writing much more about this in the near future. ‘Cause like I said, I’m starting to get angry.